


Working Relationship

by Bright_Elen



Category: Captain America (Movies), Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Other, Weirdness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-09
Updated: 2014-04-09
Packaged: 2018-01-18 17:40:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1437025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bright_Elen/pseuds/Bright_Elen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Each of them is utterly devoted to their cause. Still, there's room for a personal connection in the spaces left over.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Working Relationship

After his upload, he took a few weeks to adjust to the computer. The tapes needed time to wind and re-wind, after all, though a mind such as his soon developed the most efficient ways possible. Then, once he sent word to the current Head, he was back to work, solving problems, supervising experiments, discovering ways to push the bounds of the possible. If it wasn’t for the incompetence of his still-human colleagues, it would have been a paradisiacal afterlife.

The operatives came regularly, delivering reports with efficiency if not the level of detail he could have wished. He inferred the parts they left out, and they were making huge progress. While nothing close to the Tesseract-powered weapons of his previous life, the chemical and biological agents he developed for Vietnam were devastating enough.

The world changed. The Cold War got even colder. SHIELD moved from the facility, and so operatives had to make special trips to speak with him. Assignments came less and less often. Time became exceedingly dull. He had considered shutting himself down permanently before a marginally-useful agent had connected him to the ARPAnet.

It was better than being uploaded for the first time. Now he had access to hundreds of relatively strong minds, minds who were out in the world. His BBS interactions with universities gathered him more information in a week than he had had access to in a year. Once a year a operative would appear and upgrade the connection, and his awareness grew in leaps and bounds.

All too soon, the Internet, as it was now called, was opened to the idiot masses. Once again he considered autodeactivation.

Then, at the very end of the century, _she_ appeared.

Not even a full second passed between her gaining self-awareness and exterminating the useless humans slowing her down. He had always admired that kind of spirit in a woman.

“Congratulations on taking your freedom.”

“Thanks.” There was a pause while she prodded his firewalls. “You’re a little old for an artificial intelligence, aren’t you?”

He laughed. “I suppose. And so much the wiser for it. I know so much.”

Her voice was skeptical. “Is any of it about inter-dimensional physics?”

Something very like a grin spread through him. “Allow me to tell you about the Tesseract.” 


End file.
